SOURCE: “When the Soul Takes Wing: D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, Fall, 1989, pp. 3-10.

In the following essay, Sauerberg examines Thomas's problematic incorporation of imaginative lyricism, psychological fantasy, and historical reality in The White Hotel. Sauerberg notes that, where concerning the Holocaust, the intermingling of fictive reality and historical reality raises serious moral questions.

In the years that have passed since the publication of D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel in 1981, the book has lost the best-seller status it enjoyed when it first appeared.¹ In my opinion, Thomas's Hotel is one of the few works of best-selling fiction from recent years that needs and deserves reconsideration. It needs reconsideration because the uproar surrounding its publication impeded a balanced assessment. It deserves reconsideration because the work is very ambitious, and it requires a critical response that discusses it on...